#mercy posting oclock ig !!!

[blueberry-puffin]

no denying how repeatedly linked harrow and mercymorn are (tricky & wretched of john to entrust harrow to the person who also had a nun in their equation, and tag ianthe onto someone connected to franticide) but ortus’s declaration towards the end of the book applies more to mercymorn than to harrow — who do we blame when the one we lost is both the victim and the killer? where does that hate go, can we really stomach it? these words a bullet that grazed but ultimately missed harrow, because she could never allow herself to hate gideon again. so she hates the person hating whom is second nature, self blame as familiar as breathing. but mercymorn had resisted leading that emotion to its source, and she lived beside this grief's river mouth for 10k years, and she held that emotion close, but slightly to the side.

mercymorn, shrill, critical, unlikeable pink haired mercymorn rattles my brain because female rage can sometimes work like a bargain. scraps and empties, bruses and falsehoods, anything to placate, to pacify, to pin that rage in place for a little while longer. was there really no other way? was our mission truly worth it? did you love cristabel?

and there was another way, and the mission was not worth it. and god never liked cristabel. the second time she died, mercymorn was there to pick up the pieces, but the first time god left her body and soul alone, bloody and shattered on the cold floor. did that mercymorn, - not mercymorn the first, but the first mercymorn - find cristabel? did she go into that room where he'd left her because she checked for her everywhere? did she go on to die herself for john with ignorance or radical acceptance?

the unloveable mercymorn dooming all the nine planets because she was an atheist in love with a nun; someone who loved god well enough to die for him twice, and did not love mercymorn well enough to live for her once.

and god did not even like her.